New EHS Chair Brings Big Ideas

Before he left Harvard for Michigan, Howard Hu checked the stats. The average winter temperature in Ann Arbor, he found, is only
1.5 degrees colder than in Boston, and Ann Arbor gets less snow. “But it does have
on average 12 more cloudy days than Boston,” Hu noted one overcast October day as
he sat in his sixth-floor office in the School of Public Health’s new Crossroads and
Tower building.

Far more persuasive than the weather, though, was the chance to chair the SPH Department
of Environmental Health Sciences, a department Hu believes has huge potential. “With
a new dean, a new building, and a number of faculty retirements coming up, it’s a
wonderful opportunity to build a department positioned for the 21st century,” he says.

It’s the kind of professional leadership opportunity Hu had been thirsting for, so
in late July he and his wife of 13 years, Rani Kotha, and their son, Krishna, traded
the Atlantic for the Great Lakes and the Red Sox for the Tigers.

“I take credit for Detroit going to the World Series,” Hu grins. “After all, Boston
did it two years ago.”

He’s even more excited about his new job. The University of Michigan excels in interdisciplinary
research, he says, “and my real talent is pulling people from many different disciplines
together and harnessing their ideas and energy.”

At Harvard, he collaborated on several multidisciplinary research and teaching projects
and founded the Metals Epidemiology Research Group (MERG), which conducts NIH– and
EPA–funded multidisciplinary human-population studies around the world. Findings from
MERG studies have led to new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines
for adults exposed to lead and for lead exposures in pregnant women, Hu notes proudly.

He’ll continue to direct MERG at Michigan, in collaboration with a co-director at
Harvard and colleagues at other institutions, but his primary goal here is to build
EHS into a major power. He’s currently overseeing four faculty searches and will spearhead
efforts to attract significant new research support from the National Institutes for
Health for studies that are “more health-outcome oriented. We need funding packages
that get at big problems.

“This is also a terrific place to build the next generation of interdisciplinary training
programs for graduates and postdocs,” Hu says. In conjunction with the School of Natural
Resources and Environment, he’d like to create a course on “Human Health and Global
Environmental Change” that can attract graduate students from a range of disciplines
as well as “our smartest undergraduates.”

He’s also committed to strengthening existing departmental attributes, notably its
Center for Risk Science and Commu-nication, which recently conducted a dioxin-exposure
study in Michigan’s Tittabawassee flood plain, and the long-running National Institute
for Occu-pational Safety and Health educational research center. Hu wants to expand
the department’s nutrition program, too, into a world-class nutrition research and
training program.

Meanwhile, he and his family are liking life in Ann Arbor. Kotha is deputy director
of Global Health Programs at SPH, and Krishna is in middle school. Although both Hu
and Kotha grew up in the northeast—he in New York City and New Jersey, she in upstate
New York—they welcome the openness and ease of the Midwest, or what Hu calls “the
smooth elbows instead of sharp elbows.”

Earlier this fall, they went to their first football game in the Big House. By comparison
to Harvard Stadium, Hu says, “it was awesome. And awe-inspiring.” What’s more, the
sun was shining.

Photo by Peter Smith.

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